Company Announcements

SYGNIS named several distributors: D-Mark Biosciences distributes the TruePrime Single Cell WGA Kit in North America, Cambridge Bioscience distributes TruePrime products in the UK and Ireland, Welgene Biotech distributes the product portfolio in Taiwan, and Biotop distributes the product portfolio in Finland.

In March, LGC announced a strategic cooperation agreement with Hua-zhi Rice Bio-tech for the application of its KASP technology and SNPLine genotyping platform in developing a rice molecular breeding platform.

In April, DuPont Diagnostics signed an exclusive distribution agreement with VWR for sales of its BAX System Q7 instrument, assays and related products in the US.

In May, WaferGen Bio-systems appointed Rolland D. Carlson, PhD, as president and CEO, replacing Ivan Trifunovich, PhD, who was named executive chairman. Most recently, Dr. Carlson was president and CEO of Asuragen.

In June, InstantLabs announced an agreement to codevelop and commercialize a new Ictaluridae catfish identification test as part of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the FDA.

Eppendorf licensed its European Patent No. 1426110B1 covering its gradient technology for thermal cyclers to Alpha Laboratories and Life Technologies.

Product Introductions

Bio-Rad Laboratories introduced in March new PrimePCR Droplet Digital PCR Assays, expanding its offering of predesigned validated copy number assays to a total of 658 targets.

Bio-Rad Laboratories released in April PrimePCR Assay Kits for Droplet Digital PCR for SMN1 and SNM2 copy number determination.

In March, InstantLabs launched its SpeciesID test kits for Atlantic and Coho salmon.

SYGNIS introduced its SunScript Reverse Transcriptase with the launch of the SunScript RT RNaseH+ and RT RNaseH- enzymes.

In June, SYGNIS launched the TruePrime RCA kit, designed and optimized for the amplification of circular nucleic acids, which enables the direct amplification of plasmids from purified DNA or bacteria.

QIAGEN introduced Investigator STR assay kits for analysis of DNA evidence in forensic labs in the US, marking its entry into the US market for STR test kits. The kits feature the Investigator Quality Sensor to evaluate the quality of DNA in each sample. The first two kits are the 24plex QS Kit and 24plex GO! Kit.

Sales/Orders of Note

Analytik Jena announced in April that it received an order to supply 175 real-time and standard thermal cyclers to China.